About the Authors

Debi Ashenden is Professor of Cyber Security in the School of Computing at the University of Portsmouth. She is also the Programme Director for Protective Security & Risk at the Centre for Research & Evidence for Security Threats (CREST).

Debi’s research interests are in the social and behavioural aspects of cyber security — particularly in finding ways of ‘patching with people’ rather than technology. She has worked extensively across the public and private sector and has co-authored a book for Butterworth Heinemann, Risk Management for Computer Security: Protecting Your Network & Information Assets.

Grant Bage taught children aged 5-13 before becoming a University Lecturer and then an educational leader and manager in the Third Sector. Having lived mostly in villages or rural market towns and specialised through his PhD in the relationships between story, history and teaching, Grant is a natural Archers fan, without ever becoming an aficionado. His first teacher training essay was on the issue of rural primary schools. Had it contained more about Ambridge, it might have marked higher. In 2009 he oversaw a DfE research study and guidance for practitioners on collaboration between rural primary schools, based on case studies from Cornwall, Northumberland and Norfolk. He is now a research fellow in Research Rich Teaching at the University of Hertfordshire.

Emily Baker is a third-year PhD student working on a thesis which examines the aesthetic of age in the voice in popular music. Funded by the AHRC, her work is underpinned by discourse around the voice, cultural studies perspectives on age and ageing processes as well as phenomenological, feminist and queer perspectives on identity more broadly. In other words, she spends equal amounts of time reading Barthes, Foucault, and Halberstam as she does listening to Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin and Joni Mitchell. Most recently, her lively PhD supervisions with Freya Jarman always include a spot of Ambridge chat too.

Jennifer Brown is a chartered forensic and chartered occupational psychologist. Previously Jennifer was Head of Psychology at the University of Surrey and prior to that worked at Hampshire Constabulary as its research manager. Currently, Jennifer is co-director of the Mannheim Centre, and was also the Deputy chair of the Independent Police Commission looking into the future of policing. Jennifer researches the investigation of rape from the perspective of police decision making and the provision of behavioural investigative advice and she researches aspects of decision making in murder enquiries.

Helen M. Burrows, experienced as a Senior Lecturer in social work, is a Registered Social Worker, who works in the East Midlands both as an independent practice educator and as an Outreach domestic abuse support worker. Her professional background since the early 1990s is in Child Protection and working with adults with complex needs. She has been listening to The Archers since 1964.

Elizabeth R. A. Campion studied Law and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge and will be returning there for postgraduate study in October 2017. Having obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice, she has been employed as a paralegal and trainee solicitor since 2015. She has been an Archers listener since 2008.

Lizzie Coles-Kemp is Professor of Information Security at Royal Holloway University of London. She is a qualitative researcher who uses creative engagement methods to explore everyday practices of information production, protection, circulation, curation and consumption within and between communities. She took up a full-time academic post in 2008 and prior to joining Royal Holloway University of London she worked for 18 years as an information security practitioner. Lizzie’s focus is the intersection between relational security practices and technological security and she specialises in public and community service design and consumption. She is currently an EPSRC research fellow with a research programme in everyday security.

Angela Connelly is a researcher at the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) at The University of Manchester. Her research interests lie in the assessment of technologies and tools that can help communities become more resilient to diverse environmental pressures such as climatic change and extreme weather events. She first started listening to The Archers 10 years ago when researching her doctoral thesis, and has been hooked ever since.

Rachel Daniels is Deputy Head, and Group Leader for Academic Liaison, at Barrington Library which supports Cranfield Defence and Security at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham, where she has spent 24 happy years. She is an unashamed fan of Jazzer. Rachel has never entered anything for a produce show but she does like parsnips.

Joanna Dobson is completing an MA English by Research at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research examines four bird narratives of the mid-twentieth century and asks what they reveal about contemporary anxieties around issues of human identity. Her interests include nature writing, ecocriticism and ecopsychology. She started listening to The Archers when on maternity leave and her son was born in the same week as Dan Hebden Lloyd. She hopes that the similarities with Shula end there.

Louise Gillies is a final year PhD student whose thesis has the working title Family health history: genealogy, family communication and genetic disease which combines the fields of genetic counselling, social science and genealogy. She uses genograms to help tease out and understand family relationships in her research, initially practising on her own family and families in The Archers. This is when she discovered that every villager in Ambridge can be connected to each other in one enormous genogram. Although only a listener for about 20 years, she has inducted her grandchildren into The Archers listening circle and is very proud that the youngest has been loudly ‘dum-ti-dumming’ along from the age of 15 months and the eldest requested Barwick Green to dance to at ballet class.

Fiona Gleed is a postgraduate research student at the University of Bath investigating the role of construction materials in flood resilience, with funding from BRE, the Building Research Establishment. She is a Chartered Structural Engineer with a decade of diverse design experience, from drainage to buildings, working for Arup. In 2002 she joined University of the West of England as a lecturer teaching students including trainee flood risk managers and municipal engineers. Their experiences and dedication have inspired and focused her return to study.

Ruth Heilbronn lectures and researches at the UCL Institute of Education, specialising in teacher education, linguistics and philosophy of education. She taught in London schools for many years, has held LEA advisory posts and written on practice, mentoring, practical judgement and ethical teacher education, which is her current concern. Among her latest publications are ‘Freedoms and Perils: Academy Schools in England’ in The Journal of Philosophy of Education, and Dewey in Our Time: Learning from Dewey for Trans-cultural Practice (UCL IoE Press).

Jonathan Hustler studied History at St Chad’s College, Durham, and Theology at Wesley House, Cambridge. He is a Methodist Minister who has served in rural appointments in Buckinghamshire and Lincolnshire and who has taught a range of subjects (including Rural Ministry) to those training for ordination.

Rosalind Janssen is a Lecturer in Education at UCL’s Institute of Education. She works on the Master of Teaching programme where she first met her co-author Ruth Heilbronn, and discovered their mutual love of The Archers. Rosalind has been an avid listener since the 1960s. An Egyptologist by profession, she was previously a Curator in UCL’s Petrie Museum and then a Lecturer in Egyptology at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. She currently teaches Egyptology classes at the University of Oxford and the City Lit. She even has a course – ‘The Archers of Antiquity’ – revolving around daily life at a unique New Kingdom Village.

Freya Jarman, by day, is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool, with serious grown-up research interests in queer theory and voice in relation to all kinds of (western) music. In this capacity, she is the author of Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities and the Musical Flaw (Palgrave 2011) and editor of Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music (Routledge 2007). By night, she is co-author (with Emily Baker) of the blog Ambridge FM (http://ambridgefm.wordpress.com), casually examining the music heard in and around Borsetshire.

Madeleine Lefebvre is Chief Librarian of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Born in the United Kingdom, she holds an MA from Edinburgh University as well as MA and MLS degrees from the University of Alberta. She is a Fellow of the UK Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and an Associate of the Australian Library and Information Association. Her book, The Romance of Libraries, was published by Scarecrow Press in 2005. In 2015 Madeleine was a appointed a trustee of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library, and is passionate about the role public libraries play in the community.

Felicity Macdonald-Smith originally studied French Language and Literature at University College London; she also holds an MSc in Teaching English from Aston University, and an MA in European Language and Intercultural Studies from Anglia Ruskin University. She retired last year from Newnham College Cambridge, where she was the administrator of the undergraduate admissions office for 13 years. Her previous experience included administrative work in the French Department at UCL, English language teaching in the United Kingdom and abroad, and international youth work (Council of Europe, and World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts).

Annie Maddison Warren is the Academic Lead for the Doctoral Training Centre at Cranfield Defence and Security, a school of Cranfield University, and a Lecturer in Information Systems in the Centre for Electronic Warfare, Information and Cyber. She has worked in academia throughout her career, gaining a Masters in Corporate Management and a PhD from Cranfield University. Her research is on the management of major public sector IT projects with a particular interest in how context drives human behaviour. She won first prize for her dahlia vase at the local Produce Show in 2014.

Amber Medland attended Cambridge University for a BA (Hons) in English Literature and an MPhil in American Literature before moving to New York to spend three years at Columbia University teaching and studying for an MFA (Writing). Since then she has been living in Hackney, juggling various jobs and listening to The Archers.

Jessica Meyer is an Associate Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leeds. She has published extensively on popular culture and the First World War, with a particular focus on popular and detective fiction. Her monograph, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. She is an Archers listener of some 15 years’ standing, having started listening while researching and writing her PhD.

Christine Michael: When she is not door stepping Justin Elliott or eavesdropping in The Bull in her role as editor of her weekly blog, The Ambridge Observer, Christine Michael is a health journalist who specialises in the area of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and public health and has twenty years’ experience of decoding scientific research for consumer audiences. In true Grundy family tradition, she is a poacher who has turned gamekeeper to research and write her paper on metabolic disorders and cake consumption in Borsetshire, a topic in which she is passionately engaged both professionally and personally.

Tom Nicholls is a Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the School of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln. His teaching and research interests are in public broadcasting, British television drama and television crime drama. He has been an Archers listener for as long as he can remember. Born and raised in Worcestershire he feels a duty to keep listening for news from home.

Anna-Marie O’Connor graduated from the University of Greenwich in 1993 with a BSc (Hons) in Applied Chemistry. She worked as a forensic biologist at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory which merged with the Forensic Science Service, until it closed in 2011. Her field of expertise is the identification of body fluids and the interpretation of DNA profiles, Blood Pattern Analysis (BPA) and textile fibres analysis. She has given evidence in crown court in numerous cases.

In 2012, Anna-Marie was appointed as Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, teaching professional skills and evidence interpretation on the BSc (Hons) Forensic Biology course. In September 2014, she was appointed as Forensic Co-Ordinator at the University with responsibilities including management of collaborative research partnerships and specialist teaching on the BSc (Hons) Criminology and Forensic Studies course.

Anna-Marie is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences. She attained Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in October 2013 and is also undertaking part-time PhD studies.

Katherine Runswick-Cole is Professor of Critical Disability Studies & Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests lie in critical disability studies which seek to expose and challenge the oppressive practices associated with disablism. She believes that the lives of disabled people are sadly under-represented in The Archers and lives in hope that, one day, Bethany will come back to live her life in Ambridge.

Caroline M. Taylor is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Child and Adolescent Health at the University of Bristol. With an academic background in nutrition and dietetics, her current research interests are focused on the effects of events during pregnancy on child health and development: these include both diet and environmental toxins, such as lead and mercury. She is also interested in children’s diets – particularly those of picky eaters, with the aim of developing advice for parents and carers to avoid or manage this difficult problem.

Jane Turner’s background is in primary teaching. She is the national director of the Primary Science Quality Mark award programme, based at the University of Hertfordshire where she is a principal lecturer and researcher in the School of Education. Jane has written and contributed to several influential primary science and early years education publications and research projects. She works as an advisor to the DfE, the BBC and the learned bodies on primary science assessment and curriculum. Jane has been an ardent Archers fan since 1986, when, as a newly qualified teacher in an inner city school, she was introduced by a colleague to the delights of the Sunday morning omnibus.

Jerome Turner is a researcher at Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, at Birmingham City University. He has specific research interests in web cultures and media audiences, being involved in a variety of projects including training citizen journalists in the Arab region, ethnography of hyperlocal community media audiences, and exploring creative citizenship practices. He has been listening to The Archers all his life in one form or another, and actively tweets about The Archers in a number of guises.

Olivia Vandyk is a communications consultant and founder of Gingham Cloud. An Archers addict and alliteration aficionado, her specialisms include copywriting and social media marketing for SMEs. Her interests lie in the connections that can be made through social media — personal, professional and commercial. She has worked at the coalface of Web 2.0 for over a decade, hunting trolls and quoting The West Wing. Over the years she has worked with the great and the good and indeed Piers Morgan. Her social media marketing guidebook “Share Nicely” will be published on Amazon in 2017.

Rebecca Wood is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is a former teacher whose research focusses on autism, education and inclusion. Rebecca is passionate about trying to create more understanding of autism through challenging current norms and exclusionary attitudes. She is a great fan of The Archers, and looks forward to the day when an autistic character provides a positive role model and helps Ambridge to become a more diverse community.